Magic's Pawn (30 page)

Beside her lifeless body lay one of the five monstrosities, head a shapeless pulp. The others flowed around the Companion’s body, as if waiting for the corpse to rise again so that they could attack it. Two of the others limped on three legs - but two were still unharmed, and given what they had done to Gala in a few heartbeats, two would be more than enough to slaughter every man, woman, and child of the Leshara.

Finally they left off their mindless, sharklike circling, and turned to face the terrified celebrants. They took no more notice of Tylendel than of the dead Companion.

A man bolted from the crowd. With a start, Vanyel recognized him for Lord Evan. Whether he meant to attack the beasts, or simply to flee, Vanyel couldn’t tell. It really didn’t matter much; one of the beasts that was still unhurt flashed across the intervening space and caught him. He did not even have time to cry out as it disem-bowled him.

A woman screamed - and that seemed to signal the beasts to move again. They began to ooze in a body toward their victims -

And a bolt of brilliantly white lightning cracked from behind Vanyel to scorch the earth before the leader.

There was a pounding of hooves from the Gate. Vanyel was momentarily blinded by the light and by another surge of weakness that sent him sagging back to the ground.

When his eyes cleared again, there were three whiteclad Heralds and their three Companions closing on the fiends, lightning crackling
from their upraised hands
.
They were using the lightnings to herd the beasts into a tight little knot and barring their path to their prey.

He barely had time to recognize two of the three as Savil and Jaysen before battle was joined.

Once again he started to black out, feeling as if something was trying to pull his soul out of his body. He fought against unconsciousness, though he felt as if he had nothing left to fight
with;
both the rage and the despair were gone now, leaving only an empty place, a void that ached unbearably.

He felt a tiny
inflowing
of strength; it wasn’t much, but it was enough to give him the means to fight the blackness away from his eyes, to fight off the vertigo, and to finally get a precarious hold on the world again.

The first thing he saw was Tylendel; still on his knees, but no longer weeping. He was vacant-eyed, white as bleached linen, and staring at his own blood-smeared hands. Where the five creatures had been there was now nothing; only the mangled body of Gala and the burned and churned-up earth.

Taking her hand away from his shoulder was Savil - her face an unreadable mask.

Savil pulled her attention away from Tylendel, who was slumped in a kind of trance of despair beside her, and back to what Vanyel was telling the other two Heralds.

“… then she said, ‘I don’t know you, you aren’t my Chosen,’ “ the boy whispered, eyes dull and mirroring his exhaustion, voice colorless. “And she turned her back on him, just turned away, and charged those things.”

“Buying time for us to get here,” Jaysen murmured, his voice betraying the pain he would not show. “Oh, gods, the poor, brave thing - if she hadn’t bought us those moments, we’d have come in on a bloodbath.”

“She
repudiated
him,” said Lancir, the Queen’s Own, as if he did not believe it. “She repudiated him, and then-”

“Suicided,” Savil supplied flatly, her own heart in turmoil; aching for Tylendel, for the loss of Gala, for all the things she should have seen and hadn’t.. “Gods, she
suicaided
. She knew, she had to know that no single Companion could face a pack of
wyrsa
and survive.”

Tylendel sat where they had left him; unseeing, unspeaking - all of hell in his eyes. Mage-lights of their own creation bobbed overhead, pitilessly illuminating everything.

Jaysen contemplated Savil’s trainee for a long moment, but said nothing, only shook his head slightly. Then he spared a glance for Vanyel, and frowned; Savil heard his thought.
:The boy is still tied to the Gate, sister. He grows weaker by the moment. If you want him undamaged
-
:

Unspoken, but not unfelt, was the vague thought that perhaps it would be no bad thing if Vanyel were to be “forgotten” until it was too late to save him from the aftereffects of the Gate-magic. That undercurrent of thought told Savil that Jaysen placed all of the blame for this squarely on Vanyel’s shoulders.

:It wasn’t his fault, Jaysen
: she answered, heartsick, and near to weeping, but unable to be anything other than honest.
:He didn’t do anything worse than go along with what ‘Lendel wanted without telling me. What happened was as much due to my negligence as anything he did
.:

Jaysen gave a curt nod, but a skeptical one.
:In that case, we need to get that Gate closed down as soon as possible, or the boy will sicken
-
or worse
.:

No need to ask what that “worse” was; Vanyel was already looking drawn, almost transparent, as the Gate pulled more and more of his life-force from him. How Tylendel, half-trained, and Vanyel, unGifted, had managed that, Savil had no notion - but they dared not break the link until they didn’t need the Gate anymore.

:Fine, but what are we going to do about all
that
mess
?: Savil asked, nodding her head at the milling crowd, the mangled corpse of the single victim the
wyrsa
had killed, and the pathetic body of the Companion. :
Somebody had better take them in hand, or no telling what they’ll get up to. Go in for a wholesale slaughtering-party on Tylendel’s people, make up some kind of tale about Heralds being in on this
- : Even a hair away from breaking down into tears, she was still
thinking;
she couldn’t help it.

:l’ll stay here
,: Lancir volunteered.
:Elspeth can do without me for a moon or so. I’ll take care of the Leshara and see to
- : his thought faltered. : -
Gala
.:

:And you’ll get home how
?: Jaysen asked, concerned. :
We’re going to shut the Gate from the other side as soon as we’re through, and you aren’t up to Gating by yourself these days
.:

:Like ordinary mortals
,: he replied, with a deathly seriousness.
:On our feet
.:

:What
-
what are we going to do about
- : Savil’s eyes flicked to Tylendel and back; the boy was still staring vacantly into space, his face pale and blank, his eyes so full of inward-turned torment that she could scarcely bear to look into them for fear she
would
break down and cry.

.
I
don’t know
,: Lancir replied bleakly. .
I
just don’t know. There’s no precedent. Get the boy home; worry about it when you’ve got time to think about it. Ask your Companions; it was one of their number that died. That’s all I can think of. But you’d better get on with it if you expect to leave the other boy with a mind
.:

“Jays, take Tylendel, will you?” Savil said aloud, reaching for Vanyel’s arm and pulling him to his feet. “Lance-”

“Gods with you, heart-sibs,” said the Queen’s Own, pity and compassion momentarily transforming his homely face into something close to saintly, like that of a beautiful carved statue. “You’ll need their help. Taver?”

His Companion sidled up to him and held rock-still for Jaysen to help him to mount; like the Queen, like Savil, Lancir was feeling his age these autumn days, and needed the boost into place that Jaysen gave him. But once in the saddle, he resumed the strength and dignity of a much younger Queen’s Own - the man he had been twenty years ago. Taver tossed his head, and walked with calm and quiet steps toward the shocked, confused mob of Leshara at the other end of the garden.

Jaysen tugged on Tylendel’s arm; the boy rose, but with the automatic movements of someone spellbound, his attention still turned within himself. The Seneschal’s Herald led the way to the Gate, followed closely by his Companion, and guiding the boy with a hand at his shoulder.

He cast a look back at Savil. “I don’t fancy the notion of the ride we have ahead of us - too many things to go wrong on the way. You know more about this spell than I do - do you think you can reset this Gate to bring us out at the Palace?”

She wrenched her attention away from the unanswerable problem of what to do about the boys, and contemplated the structure of the Gate. The portal at
this
end was an ornamental gazebo in the center of the blasted garden. Through the arch of the entrance lay the dark of the ruinous cottage yard.

“I don’t see any problem,” she replied, after study. “I can bring us out in the Grove Temple, if that’s all right.”

“That should do,” Jaysen said, eyeing the sky on the other side of the portal, which was flickering with lightnings. “Good gods - why did
that
blow in? There wasn’t a storm due.”

“Don’t look so surprised, Jays,” she growled, needed to lash out at
something
and using his absentmindedness to make him the target. “I’ve told you a dozen times that Gating plays merry cob with the weather. That’s why I don’t like to use Gates. It’s going to get worse when I reset it, and all hell will break out when I collapse it.”

He pursed his lips and frowned, but didn’t reply, just waved at her with his free hand. She let go of Vanyel, who sagged back to his knees, too weakened to stay standing without her support. She raised both her hands high above her head, and made an intricately weaving little gesture. Filaments of dull red light floated from the Gate toward her, and were caught up on her fingers by that complex weaving. When she had them fast, she clenched her hands on them and sent her will coursing down them in a surge of pure, commanding power, the filaments turning from red to white as
her
will flowed back along them.

When the wave of white reached the Gate, the portal misted over, then flared incandescently. When the light died, the scene framed in the gazebo arch was that of Companion’s Field, seen by the fitful flashes of lightning, as viewed from the porch of the Grove Temple.

Savil reached down and caught the fabric of Vanyel’s tunic, pulling him to his feet again. She dragged him with her as she followed closely on Jaysen’s heels. He hurried across the Gate threshold, pushing Tylendel before him; she half-ran a step behind him, dragging Vanyel with her by main force.

The Gate-crossing hit her with its all-too-familiar, sickening sensation of falling. Then - hard, smooth marble was beneath her feet, and they were home.

Lighting struck a nearby tree, and thunder deafened her for a moment. She cleared out of the path of the Gate and Kellan and Felar darted across, ears laid back, as soon as she and Vanyel were out of the way.

She let go of Vanyel, who stumbled the two steps to one of the pillars and clung to it. She turned to face the Gate even as another bolt struck nearby. The Gate was going unstable, wavering from red to white and back again, the instability in the energy fields mirrored in the increasing fury of the lightning storm overhead. She raised her hands and began the dismissal - and encountered unexpected resistance.

She tried again, wincing at the crack of thunder directly above her. There was something wrong, something very wrong. The Gate was fighting her.

“Jays - “ she shouted over the growl of thunder and the whine of the wind. “ - I need a hand, here.”

Jaysen let go of Tylendel to add his strength to hers - their united wills worked at the spell-knot, forcing it to unravel faster than it could knit itself back up again.

With a surge of wild power that brought a half-dozen lightning strikes down on the Belltower of the Temple itself, the Gate collapsed -

Then again the unexpected; the Gate-energy, instead of dissipating back into the air and ground, flared up, and surged back down the one conduit left to it. The force-line that had tied it into Vanyel. Savil Saw it - but not in time to stop it.

Vanyel screamed in agony, convulsing, clutching the pillar as the released power arced back into him - and from him, a second, weaker arc leapt to Tylendel.

Tylendel jerked into sudden alertness - and uttered the most painful cry of despair Savil had ever heard; it was a cry that would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.

She pivoted and grabbed for him as quickly as she could as Vanyel collapsed in a moaning heap at the foot of the pillar.

But it was too late. No longer held in deceptive docility by his shock, he dodged her outstretched hand. She saw his face in another of the lightning flashes; his eyes were all pupil, his face a twisted mask of nothing but pain. He looked frantically about him with those terrible eyes that held no sanity at all, dodged her again, and then dashed past her into the tangled trees of the Grove.

Jaysen gave chase; Savil limped after both of them. Lightning was striking so often overhead now that the sky was almost as bright as day. She tried to use the line of their shared magic to get at Tylendel’s mind as she ran, hoping to bring him back to her, but stumbled in shock
and
fell when she touched his thoughts. There was nothing to get a hold on - the boy was a chaotic, aching void of grief and loneliness. It was so empty, so unhuman, that for a moment she could only crouch in the cold, dry grass and listen to her overworked heart beat in panic. It took every ounce of discipline she had to get her own mind back under control after touching that terrible, all-consuming sorrow.